When I grabbed my iPhone, switched to iPod mode and about to rushed out of the door to go to work this morning, something very strange and distressing appeared on the screen: No Content. WTF? I clicked on the “playlist” button, “video” button and “Podcast” button frenetically, no response, nada. Last time I checked, which is last night before I went to bed, I had more than 14gb of music, podcast, audio books and video loaded on the phone, now “No Content”? What is going on? I connected the phone to my computer, and a message jumped out: “iTunes cannot read the contents of your iPhone, …. please restore the iPhone to factory settings..” What? I don’t want to lose all my applications, messages and settings, not to mention the unlocked and jailbroken status of the phone!
Did some research on the internet, seems that this is a quite common problem, especially with iPhone 3G, with no obvious solutions. Many people tried factory restore functions in the iTunes and went through the unlock and joailbreak process again and again, only to find the problem persisted.
Turns out there is a very easy fix for this problem:
On your iPhone, go to general settings and choose “reset”, in the following options, choose “reset all data and settings”, confirm and let iPhone go to work, this whole process only takes 1 minute or so, depending on how much data the phone has to wipe out. All my third party applications are intact and my wifi network settings are still there. Some of the home screen buttons are gone, but they are all shortcuts to websites, so no big deal.
Next, connect your iPhone to iTunes, and a very nice surprise jumped out:
Choose restore, and you will see this screen:
The process takes about 5 minutes, after it is done, you will find that all your home screen buttons are back, together with call history, contact list and SMS messages, in fact, the iPhone will be restored to the exact same status last time you synced with iTunes. Nice, isn’t it?
